Dealing with the demons

I was in denial most of yesterday. Perhaps the terrorists didn’t actually mean to kill the players, I reasoned. Perhaps they merely wanted publicity. How could a rocket launcher miss from so close? Or a grenade refuse to go off? I was in denial because I had bought into the prevailing myth of the region - that cricketers would never be touched. Not in India, not in Sri Lanka, not even in Pakistan. No organization would want the adverse publicity.

But terrorists are not in the public relations business. They have gone beyond attracting minds and hearts to their cause and are perpetrators of the 21st century’s greatest threat, the motiveless murder. Old certainties have been overthrown by new realities; you can be the most stylish batsman of your generation and still be shot at in someone else’s war. You can be the finest left-handed batsman in the world and still take shrapnel in your shoulder on your way to work.

The physical scars will heal quickly enough. The players acted with remarkable dignity and displayed rare grace under pressure. The stories in the bus have begun to emerge - Kumar Sangakkara has written movingly about how he shifted his head slightly at one point and a bullet whizzed past his ear and thudded into the seat. In the evocative words of Joan Didion: ‘Life changes fast/Life changes in the instant/You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends’. Or, you sit down in the team bus.

How the trauma has affected this bunch of talented, happy cricketers will not be known immediately. They are like soldiers returning from war who have seen people die and know that they survived only because of enormous luck. Or, as Mahela Jayawardene said, because they had done something good in their previous lives.

They will replay in their minds the moments of sheer helplessness when they became sitting ducks in a stationary vehicle while masked men opened fire. To come back from that experience and bowl the perfect offbreak or place a drive between point and cover will not be the easiest thing to do. If some of the laughter and joy goes out of Sri Lankan cricket, it would be a pity.

Each player will have to deal with the demons himself, but they have one another to lean on - and men like Jayawardene and Sangakkara and Muralitharan to guide them. If players need group therapy or individual therapy to conquer their ghosts, the cricket board should pay. Or the ICC should. Or perhaps funds could be raised from across the cricket playing world.

Indian captain Mahendra Singh Dhoni’s there-but-for-the-grace-of-god-go-I statement from New Zealand was brutally honest, if a trifle insensitive. But he knows now, as does every player anywhere in the world, that cricketers are no longer immune. Cricket reporting borrows heavily from terms used in warfare; sadly, now playing the game itself will be like warfare. Those in denial all these years have had a rude awakening.